mickmel’s Comments

In our case, they laid it in the streets, then the installer ran/buried it to the house. It was quite a lot of work to hook it up (two guys one day to run it, a different guy the next day to connect it to the house, then two more guys the next day to wire inside... and they still need to send a crew to bury it).

AT&T laid fiber in our neighborhood this summer (Marietta, GA, suburb of Atlanta), and I got it hooked up last month. It's certainly fast. Some random thoughts:

1 -- We're a 30-year-old neighborhood of ~150 single family homes, mostly full of old people. Odd choice for fiber.2 -- Google and Comcast are both expanding fiber in Atlanta, so perhaps it was a land rush?3 -- $0 installation fee.4 -- With the max of everything (fiber, five TVs with every channel, plus home phone) it is about half the cost of Comcast.

I now have 10x the speed and many more TV channels for 50% of the cost. No idea what they're doing nationwide, but it's pretty sweet here.

Jim -- We'll make this more insane, but I have a request. I'm trying to use YouTubeDoubler to make this work, but yours needs to start at about 30.5 seconds in; the site only allows full seconds. Could you trim a smidge from it (or add an extra ~0.5 seconds of black at the beginning) so they match up? Here's the best I can do with the ones currently up: http://youtubedoubler.com/gjLD

Assume it was true, and it still doesn't matter. It's like people that don't wear seatbelts because their great-aunt got killed in crash because of the seatbelt itself. It happens, but edge cases shouldn't affect your actions.

Even if this story was true, the greater good from encryption far outweighs one bad situation.

"I know you are busy but I would really appreciate a favor. We really screwed up when we hired a company to do search marketing for us because they went out and placed many spam comments on sites including yours. We're sorry that we were responsible for that.

We're getting our comeuppance now because Google is punishing our search rankings because we have so many spammy links to our site. I know that this is all completely our fault, but it would mean a lot to us if you could delete this offending content from your site."

Please don't pin the blame for this on us. Show a bit of remorse and we'll be happy to help.

If you are using a service you don't pay for, it's because they're selling the information they collect about you...

Not always. Look at Dropbox. 95% of their users get it for free, and they get great support and (as far as I know) none of their information gets sold. The idea there is to get them hooked on the product and want to upgrade later, but if you're content using their free service (which tens of millions of people do), you aren't a product in any way.

Here's the short lesson for them: Users on the internet expect to get their content quickly, not necessarily for free. Organizations (and ill-informed people such as Bill Maher) confuse that with users wanting to always get their content for free. The primary motivation for piracy is a lack of a legal alternative.

Napster --> iTunes is the perfect example. Once Napster launched, it seemed that people just wanted free music. Granted many did, but if you give people an easy way to legally purchase music they will -- to the tune of roughly 20 BILLION songs song on iTunes. Do the same with movies, instead of these horrible "windows" and geo-restrictions, and the same thing will happen.

Be careful with statements like "An iPad can do much more than a Xoom". While the iPad is a better choice for most folks, and certainly has more apps, there's quite a bit that the Xoom can do over the iPad -- vastly better Gmail support, Google video chat (even over 3G), widgets, much better customization, etc. While you can argue about the usefulness of widgets on a phone, they're amazingly useful on a tablet.

I think the iPad is selling better partially because of the apps, but largely because of the cool factor. For many people, tablet = iPad, and that's the end of the story.

While I agree with the sentiment of the article, the facts aren't quite right.

Sarah Palin's public face on Facebook is a "Page", which by definition can be handled by multiple users. As long as they're not logging into her personal account, which they'd have no need to do, I don't see how this would break the TOS. They can log into Facebook as "Bob" and "Judy", and as long as they have admin rights on her Page then it's not a problem.

If you want to find violators, just look for any small business or church that's on there as a user profile (rather than a Group or Page), which is a clear TOS violation.